A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
This post was inspired by something i saw on Pinterest about safe vs. unsafe people, but it's along the same lines as what I've written before about the toxic person label. Is that kind of whole-person labelling actually useful? https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/618541330074396290/sent/?invite_code=f51df0af6c36491ba932da4de7aeeb6d&sender=846958411080851028&sfo=1 When I came across the image above on Pinterest, my first reaction was that there… Continue reading Are You an Unsafe Person?
Honesty is the best policy, right? I say no, no, no, no. And let’s add on one more no, just for good measure. I would also like to propose two kinds of “honesty”, only one of which I think actually involves honesty. First, you’ve got things that can be answered or described objectively. Let's say… Continue reading Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Honesty?
Up until a few years ago, my life was mostly lived "in the real world." The internet was a useful tool, but it wasn't so much a means of with others. My human contacts happened mostly in person, and I wasn't very good about maintaining connections with people I no longer saw in person for… Continue reading How Much of Your Life Happens Online?
Mental illness stigma is a very real problem. Those of us living with mental illness usually aren't thrilled when people casually toss around mental illness diagnoses as adjectives, such as "she's so bipolar" or "he's so OCD" or "everyone's a little ADHD." Yet, when it comes to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), all of a sudden… Continue reading Stigma Is Bad… Except for Narcissistic Personality Disorder?
The Gratitude Project, edited by Jeremy Adam Smith et al., is a project of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley in California. It includes chapters by a number of different authors on various aspects of gratitude. I liked that the book took a realistic approach to what gratitude can and can not do.… Continue reading Book Review: The Gratitude Project
The internet is full of talk about toxic people. Searching for "toxic person" yields 295 million hits on Google. That's a whole lotta toxicity. If someone is abusive, you deserve to a) be free from them, and b) call them toxic or whatever else you might choose. But those 295 million online hits aren't all… Continue reading The “Toxic Person” Label and Mental Illness
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg describes a form of compassionate communication. The foreword is by Deepak Chopra, which wasn't a great start for me, as New Age really isn't my thing. Rosenberg and I seem to look at the world very differently, so this is less book review and more… Continue reading Book Review: Nonviolent Communication
This Voyage of a Lifetime is the third book in the Learners at Love trilogy by Melody Finch of Caramel, Learner at Love. The books revolve centrally around Annabelle Grainger, her husband Robin, and her close friend Chris. The story is told from a third person objective point of view, but the three main characters… Continue reading Book Review: This Voyage of a Lifetime
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is personal boundaries. Kind of like our skin acts as a boundary to separate the insides of our bodies from the world, personal boundaries allow us to maintain separation in our interactions with other people. Types of boundaries… Continue reading What Is… Personal Boundaries
: The I got thinking about this recently because my best friend is a normalizer, and it really doesn't feel very good sometimes. But there are other times when normalizing aspects of mental illness can be helpful. So what's the difference? The invalidating way A little while back, I told my best friend that I… Continue reading Normalizing Mental Illness Symptoms: The Good & Bad Ways